Social factors that influence the use of language
Before we learn the social factors that influence the use of languang, I would like to give an interpretion of language and society. The answer to the question what is society is that society is any group of people who are driven togehteter for a certain purpose or purposes. Then what is language? Language is what the members of a particular society speak. Language is affected by lots of social factors, for example, gender, age, education,social class, ethnic, occupation, regions ,religions and beliefs,etc.
A language is not monolithic and there exist types or varieties of the same language and language variations are around us everywhere and at any time. In this passage, I will mainly talk about four social factors. They are region, social class, gender, and age. These social factors constitute different language variations. Because the users are different, the language is divided into six dialects.
The first one is regional dialect. It is a linguistic variety used by people living in the same geographical region. In order to study the regional dialect, people set the dialect geography.
Dialect geography is a branch of linguisitcs which studies the language differences caused by the regional factors.It belongs to historical linguisitcs or diachronic linguistics.According to dialect geography, the dialects differences are the results of language change over time and distance. To give an example, Latin developed into French in france, Spanish in Spain and Italian in Italy over a long periond of development and the subsequent political separation. The dialect atlases are very convenient to differentiate the different regional dialects. Dialect atlases are maps on which a line is drawn to show the geographical boundaries of the distribution of a particular linguisitc feature.The line is called isogloss. For example, the Benrath line distinguishes High German from the other West Germanic languages. The major diffrencence is the different prounciation of a series of sounds. As you know, the speeched are /p, t, k/ in low Germa, but /f, s. x/ in hign German.The dialect boundaries coincide with geographical or political barriors and are also influnced by ecclesiastical frontiers in Europe.
The second dialect is sociolect. It refers to the linguistics variety of a particular social class. Accent is an important marker of sociolect.For some social reasons, good accent m
wordseans good education. It has become characteristic of upper class speech community.There are three basic steps taken in the study of sociolect. They are choosing linguisitcs variables, classifying social classes, collection and anaysis of data.
Firstly, a linguistic vartiable is a linguisitic term which has identifiable variants. For example,singing-singin and fishing—fishin. The “ing” has two variants, one is /i?/  and the other is /in/. So the “ing” is a linguistic variable.Linguisitcs variable not only includes phonological ones but also grammatical ones. The example of grammatical variables is the presence and absence of “s” to show third person singular present tense.
The second step is classifying the social classes. It is fairly easy to relate the occurences of the variants of a linguisitic variables to factors such as sex and age, and the relating them to factors such as race and ethnicity is somewhat more troublesome since these are more subjectve in nature and less easily quantified. But the most complicated of all is the social classes. The clasification of social classes involes many influencing factors: occupational scales, educational scales, income level, and type of housing. Accoerding to
different criterias, the social classes are classified differently. According to the occupational scales, social classes are divided into seven groups, the  major professionals and executives of large businesses, lesser professionals and executives in medium-sized businesses, semi-professionals, techinicians and owners of small businesses, skilled workers, semi-skilled workers and unskilled workers. As the educational scales is the criteria, the social classes are classified as graduate of professional education, college or university degree, attendance in college but no degree, high school graduate,some high school education, and less than seven years of formal education. Because of different income level, the social classes refer to people whose income is above 50,000$  per month, 10,000$--50.000$ per month, 5,000$ --10.000$ per month, 1,000$ --5.000$ per month,and ess than 1000$ per month. The third step is collecting and analyzing of data. In Peter Trudgill’s study of the pronuciation of “ing” into /in/ instead of /iN/ Norwish, England.The data anslysis got the result. In the middle middle class, the percentage is 31%. In the lower middle class, it is 42%. In the upper working class,It is  87%. In the middle working class,it is 95%. And in the lower working class,it is 100%.
People usually take these three steps to study the sociolects. However, there are still some problems in the sociolects. The classification of social classes are very difficult because an individual is not easily put into a social class. Besides,the objectivity of the data is hard to guarattee because once the informants know that they are observed, their performance may not be contaminated.
The third is about language and gender. Since men and women are different, the language used by men and women also have some special features of their own. Women are more status-conscious than men and the speech closely approaches the standard variety. Female tends to have wider intonation and female speech is on the whole, less assertive and sounds to be more polite than male speech. Language differences between male and female are about four points.

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